Getting a Grip on Category Management (Part 1): A History Lesson [Plus+]

Category management is broader than strategic sourcing. For example, while strategic sourcing has been a useful methodology for procurement to proactively rationalize the supply base in recurring spend categories, the traditional strategic sourcing methodology has had a strong bias toward purchase price reduction to meet savings goals, because despite all of the talk about the importance of sustainability and supplier development, procurement is still predominantly measured on purchased cost savings rather than a truly balanced scorecard of supply that optimizes the total value of the purchase. As a result, chaining category management to traditional strategic sourcing shrinks its scope to within the sourcing silo and limits its ability as a methodology for broader organizational value creation. The goal of this series is to explain what category management is, how to best go about it, how it intersects with strategic sourcing and how it can be used to take an organization’s sourcing efforts to the next level.